Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Susan Seidelman on Smithereens, Fashion Influences and the Early Days of Public Access TV
In the opening shot of Smithereens, a pair of checkered black-and-white sunglasses dangle in the frame. Self-starter Wren (Susan Berman) swoops in, grabs them from the owner and keeps pushing through the subway station as if nothing’s happened. Wren wants to be in a band, but she doesn’t have any discernible abilities besides her fabulously on-point New Wave fashion sense. When not working a crappy copy store job, she’s going to shows and plastering up Xeroxes of a black and white still of herself all over the city, trying to drum up some kind of attention for herself. She only has eyes […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 28, 2016 -
Parting Shot: Rebecca Hall
Christine certainly isn’t a coming-out performance for Rebecca Hall, a prominent and regular presence at the multiplex since her breakthrough part in 2006’s The Prestige. But her turn as Christine Chubbuck in Antonio Campos’s Christine (out this October from The Orchard) is a devastating assault on a part of unusual complexity. Chubbuck was a Sarasota, Florida, TV journalist who shot herself live and on-camera in July 1974. In the absence of much biographical information, Craig Shilowich’s script portrays Chubbuck as a vector of dueling, uncontrollable contradictions. Hall nails a number of different personality conflicts: she’s a sometimes-beloved colleague with loyal […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016 -
Out of Great Silence
Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur unfolds in obstinate silence. Shot duration is prolonged beyond the point of narrative or reason, and the narrative is oblique in the extreme. There’s a man, a woman and a child in various configurations: in a house, running through fields, separated and together. In extended tracking shots, the woman runs through a dark forest, illuminated by a relentless light that isolates her in high contrast, as if she were fleeing a prison-yard. The thrust of what’s being seen is unclear, and the silence grows oddly confrontational. Now the hour-long 1968 film has a score. Written and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016 -
Watch: The Video Essay to End All Video Essays, On “Excellent Themes” in Pleasantville
If you’ve seen a lot of video essays purportedly analyzing the themes, visual motifs etc. of various films, you’ll know that they are, by and large, not very good, simply latching on to famous film titles for an easy traffic layup. Enter Kentucker Audley: director and actor, proprietor of No Budge and the Movies brand. In this inaugural video essay, Audley takes an analytical look at Pleasantville. “It’s a really cool movie, as you probably remember,” he explains, “with cutting-edge cinematography and excellent themes,” nailing the fatuous tone of many an online underperformer. Bonus points for blithely naming the director as […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 25, 2016 -
Symphonies and Singin’ In the Rain: Terence Davies on Sunset Song
A long-in-the-works passion project, Terence Davies’ adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song follows Chris (Agyness Deyn), a Scottish farmer’s daughter whose marriage to Ewen Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie) collides straight into the early days of World War I. There are familiar Davies visual and thematic motifs throughout — the film’s first part tracks Chris’ hellish family life under the tyrannical reign of another bad father (Peter Mullan), a wedding sequence has group sing-alongs, and a sweeping crane shot of a muddy WWI battlefield is a textbook example of his penchant for camera movement as primary narrative propellant. In the days before […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 12, 2016 -
Watch: Trump Rally, St. Louis, 3/11/16
With Donald Trump’s path to the Republican presidential nomination cleared, it’s a good time to take a look at this short documentary of a Trump rally. The place is St. Louis, MO, the date was March 11, and everybody on the ground got profane and (rhetorically) punchy very fast; it’s bracingly bleak stuff. Director Alexandra Watkins is one of Robert Greene’s students at the University of Missouri’s documentary journalism program.
by Vadim Rizov on May 4, 2016 -
“Crazy Women, the News, Florida, Guns”: Robert Greene on Kate Plays Christine
To lean on my Sundance write-up to summarize Kate Plays Christine: “Sarasota TV journalist Christine Chubbuck shot herself live on-air in 1974 and died 14 hours later. The suicide footage exists on one two-inch tape, which is inaccessibly locked up in the vault of the former president of the Florida station (now part of ABC) Chubbuck worked at, so there are shades of Grizzly Man in Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine. The premise is that Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparing to play Chubbuck in a movie that will conclude with a recreation of the suicide, and the climactic question is whether the actress can go through with it. Scenes from this ostensible […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 26, 2016 -
The Marriage Plot: Whit Stillman on Love & Friendship
In several ways, Love & Friendship has Whit Stillman coming full circle to his 1990 debut Metropolitan, which includes a heated discussion of Jane Austen’s merits. “I love anachronism, and this was the chance to film, essentially, a costume picture set in the present day or recent past,” he told Betsy Sussler in a 1991 BOMB interview. With this Ireland-shot adaptation of Jane Austen’s comparatively obscure epistolary novella Lady Susan, he finally discards the husk of the present, indulging his sentiment expressed on Twitter last summer that “The 18th century just keeps getting better & better.” The puckish opening introduces […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 21, 2016 -
Jump! How New Distributor Grasshopper Film Plans to Succeed
Before going to meet Ryan Krivoshey — the founder and, for the moment, sole employee of new distributor Grasshopper Film — I emailed a friend who works in distribution to ask what questions he would ask if he were picking Krivoshey’s brain. “HOW DOES HE MAKE MONEY?” he wrote back in emphatic all-caps. A fair question when you look at Grasshopper’s ambitious slate of first releases, which kicked off with Asghar Farhadi’s previously unreleased 2006 film Fireworks Wednesday. That’s a comparatively viable commercial proposition, given Farhadi’s high profile as the director of A Separation and relative audience friendliness. What’s coming […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 21, 2016 -
“What About the First Time I Got Drunk?” Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton on All This Panic at Tribeca
In their impressively fleet debut All This Panic, the personal/professional partnership of Jenny Gage (director) and Tom Betterton (DP) train their gaze on a group of teenage girls growing up in Brooklyn. Tracking Lina, Ginger, Dusty and Delia as they transition from 16 to 19 (with older and younger outliers), the film unfolds in a 79-minute blast, articulately speeding through years of teen not-quite-turmoil. Impressively locked in, edited for speed and emotional impact, and exponentially more complex than most depictions of contemporary teen girls in either fiction or non-fiction filmmaking, All This Panic is an empathetic rush translating their experiences into something […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 18, 2016
